"...and brotherly affection with love." - 2 Peter 1:7

Love is the seventh and final quality with which Peter calls us to supplement our faith. It might seem strange to add love after brotherly affection since we have seen that brotherly affection uses another term for love, and that term is close enough in meaning for there to be overlap. Nevertheless, Peter ends the list with love, and the reasons why will hopefully become clearer as we consider it.

What is love? It is a surprisingly difficult question. One popular slogan about love is making the rounds in our culture. I have seen signs that say, among other things, "Love is love." This is true, but it is also tautologous, meaning that the sentence does not provide any information.

Perhaps the most common and easily identifiable distortion of love is the belief that love is a feeling. We are all familiar with the idea of "falling in" and "falling out" of love. This common figure of speech implies that love is something that we enter into and leave by mistake, or at least without making a conscious choice. When the feelings are there, and as long as they are there, we say that we are "in love." But we don't say the inverse. I have never heard someone say, "I am out of love." We are either in love or we are not.

It is easier to observe this problem with love than it is to solve it. Why do we find this conception of love so appealing, even if intuitively we know it is wrong? One word: convenience.

It is far easier to describe ourselves as falling in and out of love than it is to admit that we no longer choose to give ourselves for someone. And that is precisely what real love is: the willingness to give of ourselves for the sake of a relationship with another. When we talk about being in love or falling in and out of it, what we really mean is that the other person makes us feel good, and we are willing to overlook their flaws as long as they continue to do so.

This is an impossible task. No relationship can flourish by that standard. And so friendships fizzle, romances fade, and conflict often erupts.

Scripture clearly describes love in terms other than feelings.

...but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8 (ESV)

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. - 1 John 3:16 (ESV)

The root of love is not a feeling but a choice. It may not sound romantic, but what a right understanding of love lacks in romance it makes up for in stability and dependability. Feelings are fickle things. A person who depends on feelings as their basis for the love of another will find that their love shifts according to their mood. The slogan "love is love" amounts to nothing more than "my feelings are my feelings."

True love, biblical love, is not moody. It is not inconsistent. It is not a temporary high or rush of endorphins. True love, good love, is a stable, determined, dogged disposition to give of myself in a relationship for the good of another. Love is the bond created by your choice of another; you most love what you most choose to give yourself for.

This is one reason why weddings are formalized by vows and not by whims. A vow is a commitment. Will anyone say that a couple making vows to each other is taking the romance out of love? No, they are making a safe place for romance to grow and flourish that is sheltered from flighty feelings by a solid shell of sworn promises. It is not promises of fidelity that remove romance from marital love. It is a lack of mutual commitment and self-giving that crushes the delicate passion that can flower between two people.

Why do we need love? It seems like a funny question. Does anyone doubt the need for love? There may be some.

If we understand love rightly, the necessity of love is easier to see. God loves us by sending His Son for us. Without the love of God, we have no relationship with God. And even if we could, what would the relationship be without love?

God has made love to be the foundation and culmination of our moral ethic. The law is summed up in the command to love God and neighbor. Love is fundamental to our lives. We cannot do without it because we may not do without it.

Loveless faith is a contradiction that cannot be maintained. Love is the peak and goal of all the qualities in Second Peter. Love without faith is groundless. Love without virtue is immoral. Love without knowledge is misled. Love without self-control is unstable. Love without steadfastness is fickle. Love without godliness is chaotic. Love without brotherly affection is stunted.

We may wonder what kind of love Peter is commanding here. While the love here is not referring to husbands and wives in particular, but love in a broader sense, the real-life applications are not much different in principle from what we have observed in marital love.

Christians are commanded in multiple places to love one another. It is a love that is neither optional nor unimportant. Jesus made the importance of love abundantly clear, as a passage like John 15:9-17 illustrates.

But Peter does not specify love for whom or from whom. He cites love as a general term. Yet there are other general terms he uses, such as faith, which have a clear referent. What about love?

Peter models the love he is commanding in the letter itself. He calls his readers, "beloved" multiple times (cf. 2 Peter 3:1; 3:8; 3:14). Peter is not treating love as an abstraction. The whole letter can be viewed as an act of love. And so the whole letter is an act of love.

How do we cultivate love? We cultivate love by placing love as the highest priority of our lives. If love for God and neighbor sums up the Law, then love must be placed as the highest goal and greatest good in our minds. We must learn to love as God defines it and Scripture delimits it. We must beware of distortions of love that we adopt from outside or that we produce from our own sin and/or ignorance.

Perhaps the greatest danger to the cultivation of love in our lives is our complacency to love as we currently understand it. Yet we ought to know better than to trust our own conception of the most important virtue without further examination. Of all things, our love should receive the most detailed and determined work our intellect can offer, not to analyze love into abstraction but to beat it into the right shape in our minds.

If love is like a tool forged and hammered into shape by a metalsmith, far too many of us are working with a love that is mis-forged and half-shaped. No soldier would want to wield a shapeless glob of metal as a sword in the field of battle. Yet we hope to love one another without honing our love to its proper form and proportions. The most urgent thing we could do to address our lack of love is to apply our minds to develop a proper understanding of it rather than taking for granted that we know what it is and how it should work. In this way, we can be sure to supplement our faith with a love of which God Himself approves and not just our feelings. That is how we will cultivate a love that keeps us from being unfruitful or ineffective in our knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.